This week at the VMware Partner Exchange, I am excited to speak with customers about new infrastructure management capabilities enabled only through HP OneView and VMware vCenter. Last September, HP announced HP OneView, a fresh approach to infrastructure management where organizations map out server and network configurations once in software and rapidly deploy them with the same consistent configuration each time. HP OneView draws relationships between compute, storage, and networking to accelerate troubleshooting and change management and acts as the infrastructure automation engine for any workflow through a standards-based API.

The collaboration between VMware and HP is unique and so is our new HP OneView plug-in for VMware vCenter .

Let me quickly map it out for you. This is the only plug-in that:

Enables systems administrators to automate the monitoring, management, and diagnostics and provision VMware vSphere hosts and clusters, including servers, networking, and storage, from a single management console.

Provides a software-defined management layer for you to plug into all your existing tools and runbooks to extend the automation capabilities for the tools and processes you’re familiar with.

Manages and deploys all the resources from your familiar VMware vCenter console.

As a result, system administrators can deliver IT services faster, more reliably and at lower cost becausemanagement tasks take fewer steps and there is no need to navigate between VMware vCenter and server, storage, and networking management consoles. This is what makes the HP OneView and VMware vCenter collaboration so unique. We’ve created a management environment that is based on the way people work, not on how devices work.

Real World examples of key value

Here are three powerful ways in which HP OneView and VMware vCenter combine to deliver real systems management value:

Deploy a new cluster 12 times faster – What used to take up to 15 steps to deploy or expand a vSphere cluster now takes 5

Network visualization capabilities made simple – Easily understand how resources are configured and quickly assess the impact of faults and configuration changes

Simple configuration and expansion of data stores - Complex services can now be deployed in an easily repeatable fashion

Deploy a new cluster 12 times faster

vSphere cluster configuration has always been a fairly involved process including hardware configuration, host provisioning, cluster creation and network synchronization. Through HP OneView, this process is now simplified into 5 easy steps and automation makes it up to 12X faster than before. The Integration with VMware vCenter provides the needed information through a simple wizard, and the server is configured and firmware updated, ESXi is provisioned and VMware host networking is automatically synchronized with the networks and vLANs defined in the HP OneView server profile. Finally, the newly available hosts are added to the cluster from which the task was initially triggered. It’s that’s simple!

Network visualization capabilities made easy

The HP OneView Automated Diagnostics capabilities also help simplify and speed corrective action on network faults and configuration changes. Through the integration with VMware vCenter, HP OneView enables you to visually trace and monitor your connectivity end-to-end, from virtual machines and the vSphere hosts through Virtual Connect modules and out to your production network. This delivers comprehensive understanding of the network, making it easy to determine if connectivity maps out as expected. With a simple click, you can mitigate configuration differences between host networks and Virtual Connect enclosure networking. A wizard lists the changes needed and, once confirmed, the appropriate networks and vLANs get created. Through HP OneView, you can view connectivity at the rack, row, and data center level and, with the HP OneView Map View, troubleshooting a network now takes about 30 seconds instead of a couple of hours.

Simple configuration and expansion of data stores

What’s really unique about this integration is that compute and storage management come together within a single solution. From the VMware vCenter console, the administrator can easily see how virtual machines are mapped to datastores and individual disk volumes, as well as create and manage both datastores and virtual machines. With this latest release, information that was once presented in a series of tables is now available in one graphical representation, making it even easier to understand the relationship between all the compute and critical storage components supporting the virtualized infrastructure.

We know you have invested in tools to help you manage the entire infrastructure that supports your virtualized environment. HP OneView enables not only unique integration with VMware but with homegrown or third party applications and workflows. HP OneView is the only open platform that exposes all management functions through 4 standards-based REST commands. This allows admins to inject HP OneView functions into any IT service delivery workflow, so complex services can be deployed in an easily repeatable fashion. Applications can subscribe to the HP OneView activity feed to receive instant notification of faults and configuration changes and can use the REST API to collect data, deploy profiles, send alerts, update firmware or carry out other actions.

Another important milestone in the journey

For 12 plus years, HP and VMware have been working together to help customers realize the benefits of virtualization. The powerful automation provided by HP OneView with VMware vCenter is one more proof point of the game-changing collaboration between virtualization market leaders like VMware and HP. More customers use HP servers for their VMware infrastructure than any other vendor*. And HP is the first partner to integrate both physical and virtual management into VMware vCenter Server through HP OneView. HP has the largest number of VMware certified server, storage and networking platforms and continues to provide leadership performance in virtualization benchmarks (www.vmware.com/a/vmmark). This partnership will only continue to grow and produce more solutions that enable greater business efficiencies and create greater business opportunities for customers.

Key takeaways

Users can deploy or expand a vSphere cluster up to 12X faster than before in 5 easy steps

Administrators can easily and quickly assess the impact of network faults and configuration changes

Compute and storage management come together within a single solution

HP OneView management can be injected into any IT service delivery workflow using its standard REST API